Today I didn’t ride to work. Indeed Oahu seems to be shutdown because of expected high winds. There’s been nothing on the Honolulu side of the island so far as I can tell, but I was told the windward side has had gusts.
But that’s not really what I’m interested in today. Nope, today is a Drupal day. I’m thinking of moving the website I’m the caretaker for from WordPress to Drupal.
It’s not that we’ve yet outgrown what WordPress can do, but I’d like to be able to open up each distinct area on the website to the stakeholders for each. There are fourteen distinct geographic areas and around a dozen committees as well as a group calendar. I’d like to be able to allow folks to play in their own sandboxes without disturbing any of the others. Plus, and this is a big one, I like learning new things. Drupal, I might add isn’t what’s new – I believe it’s eight! No, I’m what’s new to it. 🙂
My interest in Drupal got started in a couple of different ways. The Borders Rewards program sent me a birthday coupon for 25% off any one item. I haven’t been to Borders for quite some time. I’ll admit that lately my books have come through Amazon and many of them on the Kindle.
The other influence turned out to be an email from O’Reilly Media. They’d just published (okay, published way back in December of 2008) a book called Using Drupal.
I checked to see if it was in stock at my local Borders and got started.
The book essentially walks one through a number of scenarios and introduces concepts and tools along the way. It’s gotten some praise so far, and I’ll add my decidedly unprofessional opinion to the mix. I’m learning a lot more about Drupal then I did the first time I tried it a couple of years back when I only used the online docs. Nothing wrong with them, but I generally try to see what O’Reilly has to offer when learning a new tool and I’ve not generally been disappointed.
My only complaint so far is that the demo copy of Drupal, with the modules and themes used in the book, is at version 6.4 and Drupal is now at 6.9. I’ve tried upgrading but have been stymied by a few incompatibilities along the way.
The solution, since I’m not using this for production, is to run everything under MAMP (or xampp – which I’m having a bit of trouble with on my Mac, though none on my Ubuntu boxen). The problem centers on using .htaccess which I’ve never bothered to figure out in the past. It looks like it’s time for that too. Sigh.
Aloha!
Slower, cheaper, less useful…